Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill

Debate between Lord Clement-Jones and Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle

Report stage
Wednesday 13th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise very briefly. I spoke on these important subjects in Committee, and I am not going to repeat everything I said. I want to speak specifically on Amendment 104 on the right to repair, which the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, so powerfully introduced, just to make a couple of additional points. She said that we are per capita the second-highest producer of e-waste in the world. It is interesting that we were talking about the security implications of this Bill in an earlier group on media ownership. With the incredible amount of e-waste in the world—53 million tonnes in 2022—and the need for rare earth minerals and the other minerals that go into these replacement products, it is worth saying there is a security implication to this that people may well not have thought of.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said that the Minister said that things were heading in the right direction. It is worth noting that there are a couple of areas where it very clearly is not. Increasingly, producers of devices, particularly phones, are hard-coding error messages into their product, so that if a third party tries to repair it, there is an error message and the device will not work any more. That has very clearly got worse, not better. There is also an increased amount of parts pairing, in which individual parts are tied to the device they are shipped with using a unique serial number, so you cannot get a replacement part put in. Again, the device will stop working. I think that was a really important point to make.

I have two points to make about how much further other parts of the world have gone. First, it was EU regulations that forced the latest iPhone to include a USB-C charging point rather than a proprietary one. That has both saved resources and saved people money, because the cost is about 1/10th of the proprietary charger, so this is also a cost of living issue. Secondly, I note that Germany and Austria have subsidies for repairs to allow low-income people to get electronic devices repaired when they would not be able to afford to do so otherwise. Please let us get some progress here.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Bakewell has clearly set out our support for Amendment 104 by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and Amendments 109 and 115 by the noble Earl, Lord Lindsay, so I will not repeat what she has said. I shall speak to Amendments 107A and 107B relating to fake reviews, Amendments 105, 106, 110 and 111 regarding electrical safety and Amendment 108 on package travel.

The issue of electronic safety is a relatively new entrant in our discussions on the Bill, for which I apologise, but charities such as Electrical Safety First and Which? as well as the Government’s own Office for Product Safety and Standards have repeatedly found unsafe goods listed on online marketplaces. For instance, one investigation undertaken by Electrical Safety First found that 93% of products bought from online marketplaces were unsafe.

The Government have made a series of commitments on both online safety and product safety, included committing to ensuring that only safe products could be placed on the market now and in future, ensuring that the product safety framework was fit for purpose and making the UK the safest place in the world to be online. In my view, failing to address the sale of unsafe goods within the Bill means that they will fail to achieve their objectives in protecting consumers and promoting competition, and in addition will continue to fail in achieving their objective of ensuring that the UK is the safest place in the world to be online and that only safe products are placed on the market. By not including the sale of unsafe products within the scope of the Bill, it seems that the Government are allowing the UK to become what has been described as a Wild West for unsafe products.

There is a clear interrelationship between scams and unsafe products. For instance, Electrical Safety First found unsafe devices claiming to save consumers energy being sold on the online marketplace eBay. Not only were these devices ineffective at saving consumers energy, but they were also unsafe, placing consumers and their homes at the risk of electrical shock and fire. By not including unsafe products in the Bill, the Government therefore continue to place consumers at risk on a daily basis.

Consumers shopping on online marketplaces in other jurisdictions are better protected than UK consumers —in the EU, Australia and the USA, to name but three. The UK is clearly not moving at the same pace as comparable countries when it comes to regulating online marketplaces. The Bill is an opportunity to address that, but in its current form it is a missed opportunity to protect consumers.

I turn to Amendments 107A and 107B. In September 2023, as we know, the Government consulted on adding fake reviews to the unfair commercial practices list via Schedule 19 to the digital markets Bill, and now we have the government amendments to the Bill to reflect that. They are welcome so far as they go, but it is perplexing—informed organisations such as Trustpilot are perplexed—as to why the Government are not placing a stronger duty on social media firms and ISPs that host the sale of fake reviews. The wording does not expressly bring social media and internet service provider sites within scope where these are used by review sellers and brokers to offer their services. That seems extremely unsatisfactory, given that the Bill is so far through its scrutiny, and it is only on Report here in the Lords that we are seeing the wording that the Government intend to use to ensure that fake reviews are included in Schedule 19 on commercial practices.

Amendment 107A seeks to ensure that there is no loophole in the application of new paragraph 12A(4) inserted by Amendment 107. The inclusion of the words “for the facilitating of” in paragraph 12A(4)(b) could be read narrowly to suggest that the purpose of the service is relevant. In our view, providers of certain services such as social media sites that host the sale of fake reviews could potentially use that as a technicality through which to avoid liability by claiming that the purpose of the service they offer is not for doing anything covered by sub-paragraphs (1) and (2), and therefore this provision is not applicable in the event of abuse.

Is the Minister of the view that the facilitation of the sale of fake reviews by social media and internet service providers will be in the scope of this legislation under paragraph 12A(4), given the integral role that such services can play in enabling fake reviews to find customers? If not, why is such a gap being left in the legislation? Apparently, the Government are citing the legal scope constraints that act to limit their ability to tackle activity that happens upstream. I do not know what discussions have taken place between Trustpilot and the Government, but that sounds rather extraordinary.

I turn to Amendment 108. Since our discussions in Committee, it seems that Ryanair has started to work with some online travel agents. That definitely sounds like a win for our debates if we can take it as such, but other low-cost airlines are still resisting booking through agents, causing various harms to consumer protection, as we have discussed. The Minister’s statement about the package travel restrictions call for evidence is welcome, but the matter under discussion has always been a wider point regarding the use of third-party agents. Hence I have come back with one of the amendments that I tabled in Committee.

The Minister made one or two points in Committee that are worth picking up. He said that

“the contract is between the trader and the consumer, and therefore the consumer benefits from the relevant consumer rights”.

He also said that whether the transactional decision

“is carried out by the consumer themselves or a third party is not relevant. The consumer that the contract is with will receive the relevant consumer rights”.

Yes, the consumer is entitled to protection, but where an agent is involved this requires either the trader to pay the agent or the agent to stump up the refund themselves. That position also does not reflect the regrettable truth that consumers are being discriminated against because they choose to book through third parties.

The Minister brought up the question of the consumer-to-trader relationship and whether or not traders would

“become consumers in the eyes of the law”.

However, the issue is not that the agent becomes the consumer but that consumers who book directly through a third party are equally protected.

The Minister said that

“the Government have ensured that the CMA has significant powers to investigate and act if it finds that businesses are behaving anti- competitively in a market”.

It is not the CMA’s market powers that are in dispute; the problem is that the CMA is not acting to use those powers to investigate key consumer markets, despite clear evidence that competition is not working well.

The Minister also said:

“The operation of airlines and travel agents is governed by PTRs and ATOL. Those are being reviewed. That is the appropriate way to consider these issues”.—[Official Report, 31/1/24; cols. GC 394-95.]


Although important, neither of those addresses the misuse of market power and the damage that this is causing to consumer protection and to the viability of the market. Neither the PTR or ATOL regimes protect consumer choice or promote competition. The loss of that is the real threat, which can be addressed only through a CMA market review.

Finally, as regards ticketing, I very strongly support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan. I salute him and Sharon Hodgson MP for their work through the all-party ticketing group throughout the years. In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Offord, said that the Government do not wish to prevent consumers having choice in respect to secondary ticketing, but surely it should be an informed choice, in the way that the noble Lord outlined in his amendment. The Minister talked about the fact that the Government have legislated to give consumers fuller information on tickets that they are buying on the secondary market, but that is still not full information.

Online Safety Bill

Debate between Lord Clement-Jones and Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle

Committee stage
Thursday 22nd June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Allan. He reminded me of significant reports of the huge amount of exploitation in the digital sector that has come from identification of photos. A great deal of that is human labour, even though it is often claimed to have been done through machine intelligence.

In speaking to this late but important amendment, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson and Lord Knight, for giving us the chance to do so, because, as every speaker has said, this is really important. I should declare my position as a former newspaper editor. I distinctly recall teasing a sports journalist in the early 1990s when it was reported that journalists were going to be replaced by computer technology. I said that the sports journalists would be the first to go because they just wrote to a formula anyway. I apologise to sports journalists everywhere.

The serious point behind that is that a lot of extreme, high claims are now being made about so-called artificial intelligence. I declare myself an artificial-intelligence sceptic. What we have now—so-called generative AI—is essentially big data. To quote the science fiction writer, Ted Chiang, what we have is applied statistics. Generative AI relies on looking at what already exists, and it cannot produce anything original. In many respects, it is a giant plagiarism machine. There are huge issues, beyond the scope of the Bill, around intellectual property and the fact that it is not generating anything original.

None the less, it is generating what people in the sector like to describe as hallucinations, which might otherwise be described as errors, falsehoods or lies. This is where quotes are made up; ideas are presented which, at first glance, look as though they make sense but fall apart under examination; and data is actively invented. There is one rather famous case where a lawyer got himself into a great deal of trouble by producing a whole lot of entirely false cases that a bot generated for him. We need to be really careful, and this amendment shows us a way forward in attempting to deal with some of the issues we are facing.

To pick up the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Allan, about the real-world impacts, I was at an event in Parliament this week entitled “The Worker Experience of the AI Revolution”, run by the TUC and Connected by Data. It highlighted what has happened with a lot of the big data exercises already in operation: rather than humans being replaced by robots, people are being forced to act like robots. We heard from Royal Mail and Amazon workers, who are monitored closely and expected to act like machines. That is just one example of the unexpected outcomes of the technologies we have been exercising in recent years.

I will make two final comments. First, I refer to 19th-century Luddite John Booth, who was tortured to death by the state. He was a Luddite, but he was also on the record as saying that new machinery

“might be man’s chief blessing instead of his curse if society were differently constituted”.

History is not pre-written; it is made by the choices, laws and decisions we make in this Parliament. Given where we are at the moment with so-called AI, I urge that caution really is warranted. We should think about putting some caution in the Bill, which is what this amendment points us towards.

My final point relates to an amendment I was not allowed to table because, I was told, it was out of scope. It asked the Secretary of State to report on the climate emissions coming from the digital sector, specifically from artificial intelligence. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said that it will operate on a vast scale. I point out that, already, the digital sector is responsible for 3% of the world’s electricity use and 2% of the world’s carbon emissions, which is about the same as the airline sector. We really need to think about caution. I very much agree with everyone who said that we need to have more discussions on all these issues before Report.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, this is a real hit-and-run operation from the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson. He has put down an amendment on my favourite subject in the last knockings of the Bill. It is totally impossible to deal with this now—I have been thinking and talking about the whole area of AI governance and ethics for the past seven years—so I am not going to try. It is important, and the advisory committee under Clause 139 should take it into account. Actually, this is much more a question of authenticity and verification than of content. Trying to work out whether something is ChatGPT or GPT-4 content is a hopeless task; you are much more likely to be able to identify whether these are automated users such as chatbots than you are to know about the content itself.

I will leave it there. I missed the future-proofing debate, which I would have loved to have been part of. I look forward to further debates with the noble Viscount, Lord Camrose, on the deficiencies in the White Paper and to the Prime Minister’s much more muscular approach to AI regulation in future.

Procurement Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Clement-Jones and Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle

Committee stage
Wednesday 13th July 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise very briefly and with great pleasure to follow the noble Lords, Lord Hendy and Lord Knight of Weymouth. I could not possibly repeat large amounts of what they said. I will just add a couple of points.

First, Amendment 186 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hendy, and signed by the noble Lords, Lord Hain and Lord Monks, looks at excluding suppliers for other improper behaviour, particularly the mistreatment of workers. This a change to the Bill that I think would be welcomed by many good employers, because it would help them to ensure that they can compete against cowboys and potential cowboys.

It raises a point that I raised in our earlier discussion about supporting small and medium-sized enterprises; there is continuing debate on this issue, which I am sure we will take to Report. In many cases, we have seen that small and medium-sized enterprises, although not all of them are angels, know their workers as individuals. They are very often better employers, whereas large multinational companies treat their employees like blocks of labour to be moved around on a chess board. I would assert that ensuring that bad labour practice is punished would be of benefit to small and medium-sized enterprises, which noble Lords all around the Committee agreed was a good idea.

Moving on to the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, particularly Amendment 54 and the linked Amendment 535, it is really useful to put this into context, so I will refer to a UNISON report entitled Outsourcing the Cuts: Pay and Employment Effects of Contracting Out. It focuses on some very detailed case studies and looks at what we have seen, particularly over the past decade: an increased work intensity forced on staff, with greater job insecurity and low or non-existent increases in pay. That has happened right across the UK economy, but it has particularly been the case with outsourced contracts of the kind we are talking about here. As the report says,

“outsourced public servants are at the sharp end of this pressure.”

Those are the circumstances we have been in.

I want to pick up on what the noble Lord, Lord Knight, alluded to: that the quality of life we have in the UK, and the quality of our economy, is acutely related to the nature of that work. Amendment 54 in particular says that the

“contracting authority must take into account the impacts … on local good work”.

We have low productivity; extremely poor public health, both physical and mental; and communities that have truly been hollowed out by low pay, where no one has any money to support local independent businesses. This is a spiral downwards, and we have to get out of that. These amendments are working towards putting in provision to change that. I point to the Government’s levelling-up agenda, which is regionally based, so I believe that they do indeed want to address this.

I will pick up on one practical point and an example of how this might be used. Let us imagine that we have two bids for a contract, one of which is from a company that is trialling—as many now are, and as many have fully implemented—a four-day working week as standard with no loss of pay. I suggest that this amendment says that the impact that could have on the local community must be taken into account. Think of all the extra time people would have for volunteering or for childcare, and the impact that would have on the quality of local life. This would build in things that the Government say are part of their agenda. Perhaps it was more Cameronian, but I think the idea of communities providing local services and volunteering is probably still part of the Government’s agenda. So these amendments would deliver things that the Government say they want to deliver, and I believe they would be truly impressive improvements to the Bill.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 54, 104 and 535 and will speak to Amendments 67 and 116, which I have signed, which were all so well introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Knight. I declare an interest as vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Future Of Work.

My own interests, and indeed concerns, in this area go back to the House of Lords Select Committee on AI. I chaired this ad hoc inquiry, which produced two reports: AI in the UK: Ready, Willing and Able? and a follow-up report via the Liaison Committee, AI in the UK: No Room for Complacency, which I mentioned in the debate on a previous group.

The issue of the adoption of AI and its relationship to the augmentation of human employment or substitution is key. We were very mindful of the Frey and Osborne predictions in 2013, which estimated that 47% of US jobs are at risk of automation—since watered down—relating to the sheer potential scale of automation over the next few years through the adoption of new technology. The IPPR in 2017 was equally pessimistic. Others, such as the OECD, have been more optimistic about the job-creation potential of these new technologies, but it is notable that the former chief economist of the Bank of England, Andrew Haldane, entered the prediction game not long ago with a rather pessimistic outlook.

National Security and Investment Bill

Debate between Lord Clement-Jones and Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, outlined very clearly what this group is about. She may not be entirely surprised that I am coming from the opposite angle, although we can perhaps agree that this is a question of balancing public good—making decisions about national security—versus private profit and convenience. The financial and other implications that might arise from more time being taken over whether or not to progress are weighed against both the chance of missing something important and using significant public resources, making a fuller assessment unnecessary.

I am here, rather unusually, to defend the Bill against the amendments. Broadly, in this debate we have heard a great deal of uncertainty about how the Bill, once enacted, will work: how the details will play out in practice, how many firms will be involved and what resources will be required. I am not sure how five days was arrived at as a firm deadline, given that there is such uncertainty about the actual operation of the Bill. As it currently stands, deciding whether to accept a mandatory notification should take as long as it takes; it should not be subject to an arbitrary—a very short —deadline.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, these amendments are very much of a piece with many of the amendments we have heard in Committee—all designed to create a much tighter and less discretionary regime. That is quite right in the case of these amendments, which one would have thought the Government would find extremely straightforward to accept.

Under Clause 14, the Bill currently envisages that the investment security unit will reach an initial decision as to whether to clear a notified transaction or to call it in for a detailed assessment within 30 working days of acceptance of the notification as complete. As the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, said in her excellent introduction, there will be a significant number of transactions that fall within the scope of the mandatory notification requirements—they are set out in the impact assessment—due to the target’s activities being in a specified sector but which clearly do not raise national security concerns.

Timescales for decision-making are currently extremely unpredictable. Even before defined timescales for decision-making kick in, the Secretary of State has an initial period, as has been described, to decide whether a notification has been submitted in the correct form. The Secretary of State must make this decision as soon as reasonably practicable. That is a set of weasel words which suit the convenience of the Secretary of State, not the investor.

This lack of clear timescales creates uncertainty for investors, universities and businesses, making domestic and foreign investment in university spin-outs less attractive, while disincentivising industry partners from engaging in collaborative R&D. These are all the downsides of uncertainty, as we have heard throughout this Committee. In addition, the Secretary of State has 30 days in which to review the notice after acceptance. Especially in circumstances of fast-moving corporate finance transactions, 20 days, as proposed, seems much more proportionate. Similarly, under Clause 18, relating to the voluntary notification procedures, greater certainty would be achieved if these amendments, regarding when a voluntary notice is accepted and setting out how long the review period should be, were included.

The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, made an extremely good point: these provisions, where the timescales say “as soon as practicable” or 30 days, will be adhered to, to the letter. They are not going to be done speedily. Civil servants are going to interpret them extremely conservatively, as my own profession—the legal profession —would, because the penalties of getting it wrong will be seen to be too high. People will not want to get it wrong, whether they are in the position of giving advice to the Secretary of State or advising investors. That is why we need very clear provisions in the Bill, and we are certainly not there yet.

Trade Bill

Debate between Lord Clement-Jones and Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Monday 7th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan. I support her Amendment 43 and share her concerns about big pharma, although I would go further and suggest that the profit motive should have no place in healthcare. Chiefly, I will offer three brief paragraphs in support of the cross-party Amendment 11, so ably introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton.

Looking at the excellent UNISON briefing on this amendment, I was taken back, as was the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, to the Committee debate on the Medicines and Medical Devices Bill, in which we were discussing the place of artificial intelligence and big data in care and, of course, the dreaded algorithms. Clearly, this will be a fast-growing area of care, needing careful monitoring and democratic oversight, which is what this amendment seeks to achieve. What is decided by Parliament must not be undermined or overturned by free trade agreements. As the medicines Bill debate highlighted, these are big issues and there are huge issues around discrimination and potential misuse—accidental or otherwise—of the data, the algorithms and the whole approach.

I wish briefly to point noble Lords to the case of Henrietta Lacks in the US, including the treatment of her cells, the treatment of her data and the destruction of her privacy. It is an experience that surely should be studied as we face the loss of the protection of GDPR, as there remains uncertainty about the plans for WTO e-commerce rules and as there is grave concern about the way in which the UK-Japan agreement undermines UK domestic digital and AI regulation in healthcare services.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to the health data aspects of Amendment 11, which has been mentioned and was so well introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, and the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg. I would add to the point of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton: I join her in deploring the fact that we are debating this group of amendments, which are so important in this area, impacting on the NHS, at this late hour.

NHS data is a precious commodity, especially given the many transactions between technology, telecoms and pharma companies concerned with NHS data. In a recent report, EY estimated that the value of NHS data could be around £10 billion a year in the benefit delivered. The Department of Health and Social Care is preparing to publish its national health and care data strategy in the new year, in which it is expected to prioritise the

“safe, effective and ethical use of data-driven technologies, such as artificial intelligence, to deliver fairer health outcomes.”

Health professionals have strongly argued that free trade deals risk compromising the safe storage and processing of NHS data.

Through this amendment, the objective is to ensure that the NHS—not US big tech companies and drug giants—reaps the benefit of all this data. This is especially important given what the Ada Lovelace Institute called in its report—The Data Will See You Now—the “datafication” of health, which, it says, has profound consequences for who can access data about health, on how we practically and legally define health data and on our relationship with our own well-being and the healthcare system. Health information can now be inferred from non-health data, and data about health can be used for purposes beyond healthcare. So harnessing the value of healthcare data must be allied with ensuring that adequate protections are put in place in trade agreements if that value is not to be given or traded away.

There is also the need for data adequacy to ensure that personal data transfers to third countries outside the EU are protected in line with the principles of the GDPR. Watering down the UK’s data protection legislation will only reduce the chances of receiving an adequacy decision. There is also a concern that the proposed National Data Strategy will lead to the weakening of data protection legislation, just as it becomes ever more necessary for securing citizens’ rights. There should, however, be no conflict between good data governance, economic growth and better government through the effective use of data.

The section of the final impact assessment of the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement—CEPA—between the UK and Japan on digital trade provisions says that the agreement contains:

“Commitments to uphold world-leading standards of protection for individuals’ personal data, in line with the UK’s Data Protection Act 2018, when data is being transferred across borders. This ensures that both consumer and business data can flow across borders in a safe and secure manner.”


The Department for International Trade, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, issued a document headed “UK-JP CEPA—a good deal for data protection”. However, the agreement has Article 8.3, which appears to provide a general exception for data flows, where this is

“necessary to protect public security or public morals or to maintain public order”

or

“to protect human, animal or plant life or health”.

The question has been raised of whether this will override data protections and what its impact will be on access to source codes and algorithms. There is also the question of the combined effect of Article 8.84, on the free flow of data, which provides that:

“A Party shall not prohibit or restrict the cross-border transfer of information by electronic means, including personal information, when this activity is for the conduct of the business of a covered person.”


Article 8.80, on personal information protection, says:

“Recognising that the Parties may take different legal approaches to protecting personal information, each Party should encourage the development of mechanisms to promote compatibility between these different regimes.”


It is all very well making reassuring noises, but what public legal analysis of the language in the relevant articles—and how advocacy will be permitted despite this—are the Government going to provide? Why, for instance, are these articles included, which the EU for its part will not sign up to? Unless the Government do this, there will be zero trust in future trade deals, especially regarding the US.

To date, there have been shortcomings in the sharing of data between various parts of the health service, care sector and Civil Service. The development of the Covid-19 app and the way the Government have procured contracts with the private sector for data management have not improved public trust in their approach to data use. There is also the danger that the UK will fall behind Europe and the rest of the world unless it takes back control of its data and begins to invest in its own cloud capabilities. Specifically, we need to ensure genuine sovereignty of NHS data and that it is monetised in a safe way, focused on benefiting the NHS and our citizens.

With a new national data strategy in the offing, the Government can maximise the opportunities afforded by the collection of data and position the UK as a leader in data capability and protection. As Future Care Capital says in its briefing on the Bill:

“Any proceeds from data collaborations that the Government agrees to, integral to any ‘replacement’ or ‘new’ trade deals, should be ring-fenced for reinvestment in the health and care system, pursuant with FCC’s long-standing call to establish a Sovereign Health Fund.”


This is an extremely attractive concept. Retaining control over our publicly generated data, particularly health data, for planning, research and innovation is vital if the UK is to maintain its position as a leading life science economy and innovator. That is why, as part of the new trade legislation being put in place, clear safeguards are needed to ensure that in trade deals, our publicly held data is safe from exploitation, except as determined by our own Government’s democratically taken decisions.